


and miles to go before we sleep

by apolliades



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Bittersweet, Car Ride, Daydreaming, Introspection, Longing, M/M, Stolen Moments, a bit drabble-y, just a glimpse, one-sided-ish, or night dreaming, or something, q is sleeping for most of this, sleeping, sort of pre-slash but it's gay because i said so, whatever i cant be bothered with more tags
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-11
Updated: 2016-08-08
Packaged: 2018-07-22 23:50:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7458442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apolliades/pseuds/apolliades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It would be so easy to forget, like that, car winding up an endless road under an endless sunset sky, that either of them had blood on their hands.</i>
</p><p>james watching q sleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by [this tumblr post](http://agentsuggestion.tumblr.com/post/145850062178/agentsuggestion-when-we-have-to-drive-long)
> 
> very not polished, might be followed up. bisous

Despite having sworn with considerable vehemence that he wasn’t going to let his guard down, not for a second, it took no more than half an hour for Q to fall asleep in the passenger seat of Bond’s borrowed Aston Martin, forehead resting against the window, curls damp and sticking to his skin with condensation. Bond didn’t wake him. The day had been long and relentless, as the next was bound to be, and it was unlikely there’d be another chance for him to get any rest. 

Past Q’s sleeping head, through the window, the sky was the perfect pink yellow orange of a peach, colours bleeding into each other, the last dying glow of the sun flaring like a halo, turning Q’s dark curls red and orange and bright. Bond watched him more than he watched the road. Watched the rise and fall of his chest, the tiny space between his slightly parted lips. Watched the light play in the hollows of his face. Watched how the passing shadows changed him into someone else, then someone else, then someone else. Q looked so much younger, asleep. Awake, at work, he always had a look about him like he was in a rush, like there was somewhere else he needed to be, something else more important he needed to do. With his eyes closed all that disappeared. In the orange glow, Q looked like a sleeping child. Like something innocent. 

It would be so easy to forget, like that, car winding up an endless road under an endless sunset sky, that either of them had blood on their hands. It would be so easy, to forget anything else in the world existed except for Bond, and Q, and the hum of the engine beneath them, the smell of aspartame on Q’s breath from the energy drinks he’d been downing to try (fruitlessly) to keep himself awake. The hint of blue food dye left on his bottom lip, if Bond looked closely enough while the car idled at a red light, even though there wasn’t another vehicle in sight, hadn’t been for miles.

The light turned from red to amber to green and the car still purred beneath it without moving. So easy, to dig the tracker out of his arm, out of Q’s, kiss the wounds better and take the car as far away as they could get. Go waste what was left of their lives away on an island somewhere, drinking scotch, getting sunburnt. Someone would catch up with them sooner or later. Someone from Six, someone from Quantum, someone from Spectre. Wouldn’t matter, since the outcome would be largely the same. Obituaries side by side in the evening paper. Only difference would be where the bodies were buried, if that. They’d never have the chance to grow old, but Bond had surrendered that luxury the moment he’d taken the job. Probably never really had it in the first place. Q, though..

Between them, the car radio crackled and snarled into life. Q jolted, his inhale sharp, blinking owllike behind his crooked glasses. He was frowning a little as he turned to Bond, face more open than he’d ever seen it before in the first moments of waking, questioning, like a child asking _are we there yet? are we there yet? are we here?_

“Everything alright, 007? You haven’t moved in nearly ten minutes and we’re not picking up anything nearby. Is there a problem?”

Tanner’s voice, staticky and faint, and a thoroughly unwelcome jerk back to reality. 

“How long was I asleep?”

Q’s voice, groggy and soft and gentle, everything Bond wanted expressed in five words. 

“Everything’s fine,” Bond told the radio, putting the car back into gear, easing the accelerator, pulling his gaze away from Q back to the road, empty and endless, infinitely endless, how could it ever possibly stop? “Perhaps it was a glitch. Nothing to report here.” 

Under the hair and glasses disrupted by sleep that he was trying to put right Q’s frown deepened. It made him look older again, the fine lines returning to the corners of his eyes, the shadows beneath them suddenly heavier. Just like that a man again, just like that, innocence lost. Innocence he never really had. What a terrible liar was sleep. 

Q was directing his frown out of the windscreen. Bond silenced the radio with a little more vigour than necessary, cutting Tanner off in the middle of a sentence he hadn’t been listening to anyway. Further frowning from the Quartermaster. 

“Only a couple of hours,” Bond said, addressing the infinite road ahead. Q started, looked like he’d forgotten the question he was being given an answer to. “It’s alright. You should go back to sleep, if you can.” 

He felt Q’s gaze shift to the side of his face. That frown all full of questions he either didn’t bother to hide or didn’t know how to. 

“You’ll need it.” 


	2. II

Q sat slouched against the window of a stolen car, bleeding gently into a white bandage wrapped neatly around his forearm where Bond had cut his tracker out, a couple of miles before the Scottish border, pulled over into a shadowed lay-by.

“It’s safer this way,” Bond had told him, and he hadn’t argued, hadn’t protested even when the sting of the blade under his skin had brought him to tears, even though he knew better, or liked to think he did. Just bit hard on the inside of his cheek as the blade of Bond’s Swiss army knife dove an inch into his skin and surfaced with the tracker speared on its tip. And Bond had known then, from the look in Q’s wide wet eyes and the way they held his, that Q would follow him to the ends of the Earth and wouldn’t even stop to ask why. So afterwards, he took him by the wrist and kissed the bandage where it was just starting to stain red.

Q didn't go back to sleep; it always unsettled him to wake somewhere unfamiliar. So instead he leant against the car door and solved Sudoku puzzles on his tablet until it became mind-numbing — a matter of minutes. Then he tried to read, but got stuck in the cycle of tracing and re-tracing the same line over and over, and had to give up. Working for Six had utterly destroyed his ability to relax. 

Bond offered nothing in the way of conversation. Now Q was conscious, he kept his steely gaze quite firmly on the deserted road ahead. Q watched him adjust his grip on the steering wheel. 

“We’re officially AWOL, then,” he said, after a little while. Bond hummed in agreement; the corner of his mouth twitched. 

“How did you know I’d come with you?”

“I didn’t.” 

 _That’s a lie,_ Q thought. He watched Bond’s hands and thought about his fingers around his wrists and how easily Bond could crush him if he wanted to. Q wasn’t weak and certainly wasn’t helpless but he was unarmed, and next to Bond, felt tiny. 

“What if I hadn’t?” he said. 

Bond didn’t answer; Q didn’t really expect him to. The lack of answer served as answer in itself. Silence claimed the space between them once more and neither man tried to stop it. Q turned his gaze to the window and imagined what it would feel like to have his radius bone shatter. 

-

The road twisted and wound up the slopes of Scotland and Q stopped questioning why their car was the only vehicle for miles. It was dark now, crushingly dark; the night was moonless and even though the sky here did not share the constant orange glow above London, the thick walls of Scots pine towering either side of the road blocked out any starlight. Q watched the headlights dance with the trees' shadows.

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,” he recited, slow and soft, breath fogging the window. He felt Bond’s eyes on him, “but I have promises to keep.” 

“And miles to go before I sleep,” Bond’s voice was low and even and Q could hear the frown in it. He didn’t turn from the window, but closed his eyes and laid his head against the glass, and smiled. 

“And miles to go before we sleep.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i don't know how many parts there're gonna be to this cus it was originally gonna be a oneshot but whatever i have at least one more planned so fuckin.. you're welcome xo


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